


About Jack

by always_a_birthday_girl



Series: (thoughts at the end of the world) [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Background Castiel/Dean Winchester - Freeform, Drama, Family Dynamics, Fighting, Jack Needs a Hug, Making Up, Other, Sam Winchester is So Done, wtf were they doing in season 14 anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 08:10:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_birthday_girl/pseuds/always_a_birthday_girl
Summary: Cas struggles to fix everything, while Dean fights to break it. And Sam is so tired, it takes him far too long to realize nobody's talking about Jack.





	About Jack

i.

 

Jack's ever-shifting eyes were burned in Sam's memory.

From the moment the nephilim had first stepped out of the shadows in his nursery, those eyes had been the first and last thing Sam remembered about him. Powerful, old, and removed from humanity—just like Jack himself.

They'd brought him down slowly, Dean and Sam and Cas, reeling him in like a kite that had blown too far into the sky, but some part of Jack had stayed up in the stratosphere, only coming down occasionally to beat in his ghostly wings, a physical reminder of his inhumanity.

He'd been magnetic, hypnotic, electrifying. He'd reminded Sam what it was like to be young and wide-eyed and hopeful about the world. He'd fizzed like Mountain Dew down the throat of their stale lives and changed things. Changed everything. He equalized the game in ways they'd never dreamed possible.

And he'd liked Sam best.

Jack had always liked Sam best.

 

ii.

 

They'd had their share of long, cold nights, but this one was the worst. The bleak, not-quite-spring evening stretched into a morning that turned to an entire week, and there were no answers. No end in sight. Nothing but the charred remains of what Sam didn't want to think of as his mother.

Jack killed her. Dean was adamant about that, and Sam was too tired to argue. They'd find the truth when they found Jack. He'd tell them the truth. He always had.

"He lied to us about using his powers." Dean was making out like Jack had never been one of them, harsh and cold in his grief. "That thing out there isn't Jack, not the Jack we knew. Maybe that kid never existed."

"You called him your son," Sam said, but his brother was too busy being righteously angry to hear.

He didn't understand how Dean could just switch it on and off—how one day Cas could be a monster that needed to be hunted, and the next Dean was keeping his trenchcoat balled up in the back of the Impala to use as a friggin' pillow. Ketch was a dick; Ketch was their new best friend. Rowena was evil, Rowena should totally marry Sam and make this whole _you'll be the death of me_ thing legit.

Sam couldn't keep up. Sometimes he wondered if Dean even felt things the way normal people did. Evidence pointed to no. Maybe all those years with Dad had broken Dean's ability to form a real and lasting connection with a person, and these strange, half-relationships were the only thing he could manage.

Sam couldn't just decide to hate Jack, even after what happened. He wanted to, and he tried to, and he'd be lying if he said he wasn't hurt and angry about what Jack had done. But.

He kept remembering things that made him soft and stupid. Jack trying on cowboy hats. Discovering birds. Being excited over things that Sam hadn't felt excited over in a long time.

Jack liked birthday parties and Twinkies and doing the laundry. He thought _Hey, Arnold!_ was the best show in the world. He'd just been learning to dance, and make jokes. He'd start a sentence with "Dean said . . ." just to see Sam wince, and then he'd laugh and add, "just kidding!"

He liked "kidding".

And popsicles. And meeting new people. And everything, absolutely everything, that Sam had thought was gone from the world. He pointed out sunshine and kindness and how wonderful it was to have potable water. He had a knack for bringing up points Sam hadn't considered, like how tired God must have been after millennia of people not believing in him. Sam understood being tired. Thanks to Jack, he felt like he understood God a little better, too.

He couldn't just _forget_ someone like that.

And maybe—okay, most likely—Jack killed Mary. The thought made Sam weak at the knees, but he forced himself to hold on to it because it was important. They'd lost Mom; that was fact. He didn't want to lose Jack on top of that.

Dean was hurting. Sam got that. Dean was hurting and he was doing that thing where he lashed out at everybody else and pushed away the people he loved and blamed a lot of people who were completely innocent for everything that was going wrong. Sam knew Jack wasn't innocent. He also knew Jack didn't deserve to die without getting a chance to explain his side of the story.

Dean would come around when they found the kid. He'd look into those blue eyes—so strangely like Cas's—and remember they were a family, and he'd be pissed and hurt and maybe they'd fight a little but everything would be okay. Jack would apologize, and be wrecked, and Sam would scrape him off the floor and dust him off and talk Dean into forgiving him, as impossible as that felt right now.

And it would be okay. They'd go back to being okay. Sam had to believe that right now, because the alternative was that this long, cold, empty night would never really end, and would dog Sam's memory forever as the night he lost it all.

 

iii.

 

Sam was fine. He was sad, but he was fine.

Totally fine.

He'd gotten a second chance to know his mom, and that was more than most people got. He was grateful for the time he'd had. The memorial was touching. He was worried about Dean.

But Sam. Sam was fine.

Sam had only been beaten within an inch of his life by Nick a few weeks back. And before that, the kid he loved almost more than life itself had burned through his soul to kill an archangel who'd been terrorizing them for months. There had been those long, horrible months of little sleep and a lot of stress, when Michael ran around in Dean's body and it seemed like they were going to lose him forever.

Sam was fine.

They'd lost Gabriel. Freed Lucifer for a second time. Sam had gone through a few mental breakdowns, nothing major. Oh, and he'd died. Again. Before that had been Amara and the Mark of Cain, and the Men of Letters and being tortured for weeks. A little bit of mind-rape thrown in, just for fun.

But Sam was fine, after all, none of that had compared to the sheer torture of Lucifer riding shotgun in his skull for a year or a hundred. He'd gotten over that, he could get over anything.

He still saw things, sometimes. It didn't worry him too much. He could still distinguish between the hallucinations and reality, and he figured that was the most he could ever ask for. It probably wasn't a crazy thing, anyway. It was a lack-of-sleep thing. A stress thing. A losing-Jack-and-Mom-and-our-whole-hunter-network thing.

There were days when he almost liked it. When it was worth it to be able to bicker with Maggie over the grocery situation, if only in his mind. To hear Jordan's goofy laugh or Amber's dry snort. That sort of thing.

He didn't mention it to Dean. The guy had enough on his plate without adding fixing Sam to the mess. He'd done more than his share of that in his lifetime, anyway, and they were too old to keep playing these games where one of them slid to insanity and the other yanked him back in the nick of time.

They were too old for a lot of things. The dying, the losses, the constant battles. Maybe even hunting itself. Sam had always thought they'd be one of the families who could hack it, one of countless generations of Winchesters and Campbells who carried on the family business. But maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe this was the generation that would finally break the chain.

But, honestly, that was fine too.

 

iv.

 

_You've always been in his corner._

 

v.

 

Castiel was not happy.

"The _box_?" He paced when he got upset, same as Dean. He was pacing now. "You thought it was a good idea to lure him into the _box_?"

Sam's guilt rose with each word.

"What are you going to do when it no longer holds him? He must know by now—why didn't you at least wait until I came home?" Cas whirled on Dean. He seemed, as always, to hold Dean personally responsible for every event that had happened in his absence. Although Sam had to admit this one was very much on his older brother.

Dean didn't have a flicker of remorse in his voice when he replied, "So you could talk us out of it?"

They were congregated in the kitchen, the three of them, gathered around the small, wooden table in the corner. Sam was sitting opposite Dean, hunched over the table like it had to be protected from the angel's anger. Cas was standing.

He leaned down now, resting his palms in the space between Sam's folded arms and Dean's side of the table. "You haven't let me talk you out of anything since 2011."

They'd been pushing a fight for the last few days, circling around it like feral dogs but never fully committing. Both Dean and Cas seemed afraid to open that particular can of worms, as if they knew Jack was the one fight they'd never walk away from.

"Look, man, you weren't here. We had to make a call." Dean ran a hand over his cropped hair, disaffected, pushing the balance of his chair on two legs. "I didn't _want_ to do it."

"Bullshit." Cas loomed over him, as intimidating as Dean was unflappable. "You're lying to me."

Sam didn't want to be in this discussion right now, not when Dean met Cas's eyes, their disagreement easily flowing into a silent exchange of increasingly hostile looks. He didn't need the reminder that he was the third wheel, the unneeded parent, the last party consulted in any given situation. He didn't blame Cas for still thinking of him as a child; the angel was a couple thousand years old, after all; but Dean should know better.

He didn't, but he should.

Sam stood, chair grating across the floor, nearly head-butting Cas in the process. Cas barely acknowledged the movement. Dean didn't at all. They continued to stare at each other in tense silence. Sam drowned in his.

"We had to make a call," Dean repeated, slowly. "I didn't want to do it."

Cas narrowed his eyes like he didn't buy it.

Sam tried, unsuccessfully, to melt into the floor.

 

vi.

 

He was calling their names in turn; Cas, Dean, Sam, then Sam again. Always Sam twice, before going back to Cas, in haunting repetition. Even as Cas and Dean not-quite-fought around him, all Sam could really hear was Jack.

The kid was scared. Confused. He wasn't all the way Jack, but he wasn't all the way _not_ Jack, either. He was stuck in the middle, and Sam knew how that felt. He was pretty sure every soul in this bunker knew how that felt, but somehow it wasn't enough to earn the nephilim a little sympathy.

"You knew something wasn't right with him!" Dean was ranting, again, because he had the tendency to repeat himself when he was upset. And, come to think of it, even when he wasn't. Not a man of words, Sam's big brother. "You knew he needed—fuck, I don't know, something we weren't giving him!"

"He's my _son_!" Cas was raising his voice, too, responding to Dean's aggression in kind. Maybe they were going to have the argument after all.

"I don't see how that makes any difference—"

"And if it were Sam?" Cas interrupted. "Because it _has_ been Sam, time after time."

"I've always done what needed to be done."

Sam fiddled with the sleeves of his shirt. It wasn't about him, he wanted to remind them. It was about Jack. But Dean was grabbing Cas's collar, snarling like a hellhound, and Cas was pushing him against the wall and—as always—Sam was nothing but background noise to their lover's quarrel.

They weren't even fucking, for crying out loud.

Cas wanted to save Jack. Dean wanted to kill him. And neither of them cared what Sam wanted, which was fine for once because Sam didn't _know_ what he wanted. He needed time to think; time and silence and more information. He didn't want to be pushed into making a choice right away.

He didn't want to be pushed into making a choice, period.

Jack called his name again; he flinched. Neither Dean nor Cas noticed, too caught up in their bordering-on-a-shouting-match. They were in each other's faces, hurtling the same lines back and forth. It was always the same score: _you lied, you promised, you left. I told you so. Why don't you trust me? well you lied you promised you left._

Maybe this was just their lives now, finding new reasons to stage old fights. Cycling through the same old routine until they died, or he and Dean died and Castiel went on to find a new family to play with and Jack . . .

Sam's thoughts stopped there, because he didn't know about Jack. He still, after two years, didn't know about Jack. He'd never asked. It was too late now, but he still wondered—had Jack meant to stay with them, right up until the end? For them, or for Cas? Or was his stint with the Winchesters only a stepping stone, a nest he was meant to leave one day?

It wasn't the kind of thing you could bring up over Cocoa Puffs, whether you were a foster family or a real family or some hybrid of the two. There were all shades of families, these days. Sam hadn't thought finding a label was important, any more than he'd thought it was important to make the distinction between father, brother, uncle.

What had mattered was that Jack had a family, had a home, had all the things Lucifer had tried to deprive him of. That had been why Sam had taken the kid in. He didn't know what Dean's reasons were, but apparently they didn't run as thick as Winchester blood because the second Jack laid a finger on Mom, he was as good as dead in Dean's book. End of story.

"Even—" Cas's voice broke, catching Sam's attention. The angel still had Dean against the wall, hands on either side of his head. Dean's fingers were still tangled in Cas's collar. "Even when it was me, and the Leviathan, you didn't give up."

Sam had never heard him talk about that year. He'd assumed it was one of those things they just didn't talk about, like Ruby or Lisa or how Dad's haphazard raising of them wasn't half as okay as they pretended to the outside world, Mom included. Now, given the way Dean looked at Cas, he thought maybe it was just something they didn't talk about in front of _him_.

"Cas—" Dean's grip loosened, hands falling to his side. He let his head hit the wall. "It just has to be this way."

He looked so defeated.

Sam used to know every color of Dean's moods, even after they met Cas and pieces of Sam's brother became forever unreachable and twisted. He used to know Dean's coping methods like the back of his hand, able to pinpoint exactly which emotion Dean was fighting against at the moment. But the expression Dean was giving Cas now was indecipherable, his behavior completely irrational. Sam couldn't find rhyme or reason to Dean lashing out this time.

And then he realized Jack had stopped calling his name.

 

vii.

 

Jack's eyes were fire and gold.

 

viii.

 

Sam was beginning to think they'd made a terrible mistake. _He'd_ made a terrible mistake.

Because Jack could have killed them. It would have been easy, thoughtless, a logical counterattack to their clear declaration of war. But he didn't.

Sam thought that counted for something. He thought, messed up as it was, that trying to bring Mary back counted for something. He was starting to believe that Dean was wrong about Jack not being Jack, only they'd been moving so fast it had been hard for his beleaguered brain to catch up.

Jack could have killed them. He'd killed Mom just because he wanted her to be quiet. Why hadn't he _accidentally_ shut them up the same way? It didn't make sense, unless there was a part of him that still wanted the Winchesters alive. Which meant Mom's death really had been an accident, and not one of the careless, stepped-on-a-spider variety. But Jack couldn't care if he didn't have a soul, right?

And whether he had a soul or not, the more Sam thought about it, didn't make a damn difference in this case. He could just have easily—no, _more_ easily—lost control of his powers and hurt someone if he still had the ability to feel. In fact, he should have been more in control without those pesky emotions getting in the way.

So.

So . . . what? Sam was still struggling to connect the dots, but he knew he was onto something. If he could just get a straight minute to _think_ , without Dean dragging him off to here, there, and everywhere, he'd be able to come up with a point so valid, even his off-kilter brother wouldn't be able to argue.

Dean wouldn't give him a straight minute, though. Dean wouldn't even give him a second. The instant Jack vanished from the bunker, Dean was yelling at Cas, who yelled right back, and Sam had to pry them apart like squabbling children and send them to their separate corners. Then Dean was pressing Sam to come up with a way to find Jack, and they were bickering about whether or not they'd kill him, and Sam hadn't found his perfect argument yet so he was sticking with the old standby that they simply didn't have a _way_ to kill him.

He hit on facial recognition software by mistake, but at least it got Dean out of the bunker and killed a good two hours of their time driving. Sam didn't know why he was buying time for Jack to hide, or run, or find a new universe to inhabit. Dean would be furious if he knew Sam wanted to give the kid another chance.

Jack could have killed them, and didn't. Sam held on to that.

It seemed like he still got upset. Donatello was more than capable of being agitated, borderline anxious, on any given day. And Sam had found himself closest to humanity, when he was the one running around without a Jiminy Cricket, with cold anger coursing through his veins. It was possible, if not to feel without a soul, then to remember the ghost of the feeling and act accordingly. Sam could remember not wanting to hurt Dean, even if he hadn't loved his brother the way he was supposed to.

So he knew that pieces of a person stayed behind, pieces that ran deeper than just habits or personality quirks or logical thought processes. And what if . . .

They knew so little about nephilim. Sam kept turning over what he did know while they were in the car and Dean was bitching about internet startup companies, or millennials, or something to that effect because he was a loser stuck in 1987.

Nephilim had a human soul and an angel's grace. Nobody could explain to Sam's satisfaction what either were, but it was clear that the divide between humans and angels began there. Anna Milton had acted like her grace was a barrier between her and emotions, but Cas seemed to comfortably handle both over the years so maybe she'd just been trying to escape Heaven's hold.

But Sam was thinking. If taking away Jack's grace had upset his human side, then wouldn't taking away his human soul send him off the deep end, angelwise? Maybe it wasn't that he couldn't feel anything anymore. Maybe it was more complicated than that.

Everyone in the city was telling the truth. Sam got distracted with that, and then there was a brawl, and then.

Well, then God came back.

 

ix.

 

The Creator of the Universe had gone gray, not that Sam was judging. He still acted like a dorky dad, poking around the bunker, geeking out over their (admittedly impressive) weapons collection, revealing embarrassing details about their personal lives.

Sam wasn't sure if he hated Chuck or not. It wasn't an easy situation. On the one hand, he was kind of pissed that the guy had left them all to deal with the horrendous state of the world alone. On the other hand, he was flattered that God obviously thought they had this one in the bag. They were his guys, his go-to team. His favorites.

Who wouldn't be mollified by that?

Dean. That was who. Dean had never warmed up to the Big Guy, and—with his patented lack of respect for any authority figure—didn't give half a shit about hiding the fact. They were all lucky that Chuck appeared to find it more amusing than offensive.

"I know what you're thinking." Chuck was in the library, poking through Sam's obsessively organized monster manuals. He looked up long enough to flash a self-conscious grin. "I mean, obviously I know what you're thinking all the time."

"Right." Sam didn't have a good answer to that. He leaned on the edge of the research table and tried to feel more comfortable with this whole situation. Last time God had walked among them, Sam had felt so . . . relieved. Secure. Like Chuck would take care of everything, or at least make sure that Sam and Dean didn't die.

It was different this time. Sam couldn't shake the tension in his muscles, the intuition buzzing at the base of his skull. Maybe it was just because he knew Chuck was capable of abandoning them again at any time, or because he was rightly afraid of the being that could unmake him in an instant, but he doubted that was entirely it.

There was a smog to the air now, something invisible that clouded Sam's lungs and felt a hell of a lot like a coming storm.

"Figures of speech have always been tricky for me." Chuck bent to scan the next shelf. "I keep up with the times, you know? Dropped the _thee_ s and _thou_ s for _y'all_ s and _you guys_. But some things just don't translate. I can't very well say 'I'm all ears', next thing you know, I really will be." He straightened, gesturing to his body. "Whole body. Just made of ears."

Sam blinked, once again failing to come up with an appropriate response.

"Not to say that I don't have complete control over my power." Chuck shook his finger at Sam. "I do. It's just that, even for me, quite a lot of _meaning_ goes into speech. It holds a certain weight." He turned back to the bookshelf. "Tangent aside, I was just going to say that I know what you're thinking. You're wondering why I didn't just swoop in and fix everything. Right?"

Sam assumed that was a rhetorical question.

Chuck pulled out one of the volumes on the shelf, holding it open in both hands. "Believe it or not, I'd really like to. I'm a writer, after all. We like to meddle, to make sure things go exactly the way we want." He flipped a couple of pages, landing on a sketch of a hellhound. Jack had made it. Sam couldn't draw for shit. "I used to be pretty involved—well, I guess you already know that story. Point is, I've learned that so many more _interesting_ things happen if you just sit back and watch."

Sam crossed his arms. "People get hurt. They die."

"That one's not on me." Chuck snapped the book shut. "I understand the need to blame me, Sam. From your point of view, it must look like I'm not taking responsibility for my children. But tell me this. Was John Winchester slacking in his responsibilities when he let you leave for college?"

"Wh—Dad didn't _let_ me." Sam frowned. "He didn't want me to go at all. But it wasn't like he could stop me, I was an adult."

Chuck raised his eyebrows. "You mean, John couldn't have physically stopped you if he wanted? He couldn't have enlisted Dean's help to force you to fall in line?"

"I—well, yeah, I guess. But he wouldn't have done that."

"Why?"

"Because it was my choice. Because he—" Sam faltered, understanding. "Because I was an adult. And he knew he couldn't make decisions for me forever. I had to make my own . . ."

"Mistakes," Chuck supplied. "Exactly. It would have been easier for you, I think, if John had followed you to college and held your hand and done everything for you, but you would have never grown. You wouldn't have met Jessica."

"And I wouldn't have kick-started the Apocalypse." Sam narrowly refrained from pointing at God. "Thanks for that, by the way."

Chuck shrugged. "I'm not going to step in and stop every bad thing from happening. A long time ago, humanity made the choice to leave me and go to college, to keep with the metaphor, and now you get to deal with the consequences."

Sam looked away. "You could have come back for Jack, though. Before now. Even Dad came back to help us defeat Yellow Eyes."

When he glanced back at Chuck, the Creator looked surprised. "Did you just defeat me at my own metaphor game?"

"It's not a game. Jack's—" Sam stalled again. He didn't know what Jack was. Important. Hurt. Frightening. _Frightened._ "He told me he thinks you're tired."

Chuck's eyebrows rose again. "Tired? He said that?"

"Yeah. I'd never thought of it that way before. He said it must be hard to watch your own children lose faith in you." Sam wondered if he should stop there, but it wasn't like God didn't already know. "I always thought that, if you really wanted people to believe in you again, you should just. You know. Come back."

Chuck was eyeing him carefully, blue eyes thoughtful. The book was forgotten in his hands. "Fascinating. After everything Lucifer did to you, you still became his son's biggest champion."

"What?" Sam tried to back away from both the statement and the conversation and the person who'd started both, forgetting there was a table behind him. Being bolted to the floor, the table didn't move. Being not bolted to the floor, Sam did, staggering to the side and making the King of all Kings snigger like a four-year-old.

"It's really one of my favorite parts of humanity." The smile was still lurking in Chuck's eyes, even if he did try to school his face into a more serious expression while Sam worked out his balance issues. "And you, specifically. You'd give anyone a chance, despite having more reason than anyone to hate the world." He nodded, seemingly satisfied. "I did well with you. You're the son I wanted Lucifer to be, which is ironic, all things considering."

Sam didn't know if he was supposed to feel grateful or self-conscious or what. He settled for scratching the back of his neck and shrugging. "It's not like that. It's just that, more often than not, I've been the one needing a second or third or fourth chance at something."

"Mm." Chuck nodded again. "That being said, you do know that Jack still has to die, right?"

It was good, Sam thought, that all of God's questions were rhetorical.

 

x.

 

When Sam finally found his voice, it was too late.

 

xi.

 

 _Get on board or get out of my way,_ Dean had said, and Castiel had made his preference clear. Still, Sam wasn't the least surprised to see the angel at the graveyard, standing on Jack's side the way Sam himself should have been.

Sam wouldn't be able to face him, after. If Dean fired the _Equalizer_ , the Chekov's fucking gun Chuck had provided, and wiped both Jack and himself off the planet—Sam wouldn't be able to look Castiel in the eye ever again.

Couldn't Dean see that it wasn't just Sam he was doing this to? It was Cas, and Jack, and Mom's memory, not to mention all of their friends and family—

Sam had thought they'd moved past this self-sacrificing streak of Dean's, but it looked like they'd only managed to hold it at bay for a few months.

He was supposed to be getting better. Jack was supposed to have changed him, like he'd changed everything else. Having Jack and Cas and Mom was supposed to have taken the burden off Sam, given Dean more people to talk to, more supports in his house, more keys to unlock the hundred and ten doors he hid his emotions behind. Somehow, though, things had only gotten worse.

Dean was pointing the gun right at Jack's head, and this was different now. It wasn't like the box. Jack wouldn't come back from this one. Dean couldn't change his mind after he pulled the trigger. And the kid was on his knees, for crying out loud, couldn't Dean see that _this was Jack_? It had always been Jack, the same Jack, he hadn't changed since losing his soul. He was misguided, but when wasn't he?

He was still a child. He wasn't ready to make decisions for himself, which meant he wasn't ready to face the consequences, either. That was where Dean had it wrong, and Castiel had it wrong, and even God himself had it wrong. You weren't grown up just because your parent said you were. That wasn't how it worked.

Sam was running full tilt toward them, but he could tell he wasn't going to make it in time. Dean was fast with the trigger, and the only reason he and Jack weren't dead right now was because he was hesitating. There was hope. Sam tore onward, screaming at the top of his lungs.

"DEAN! NO! JACK!"

He was beginning to sound like Jack had, in the box. He felt more alive, more _awake_ , than he had in months. Panic blew through his mind like a cyclone, throwing his systems out of orbit and reminding him that he wasn't done yet. He couldn't be done yet.

"JACK!"

Jack turned his head, fractionally, eyes meeting Sam's across the distance. They were blue, same as Cas's, same as Chuck's, same as Lucifer's, but nothing about him was really the _same_ as any of them. He was a brand new creation, a something that took all the best parts of Sam and Dean and Castiel and even the Devil and God and made a being worth saving. Jack was worth saving.

Surely Dean had to see that.

"DEAN!"

Dean didn't flinch. His arm was steady. But he hadn't shot yet, and that meant he wasn't sure. Cas was right there, pleading, looking seconds away from stepping in between Dean and the kid. If Dean fired the gun, it wouldn't just kill him and Jack. It would destroy everything.

Sam couldn't take that. The thought of losing Jack was horrible. The thought of losing Dean was beyond comprehension.

They were his family, and they were all being incredibly stupid. Was this how Mom had felt all the time? No wonder she'd needed time away so often. It was a miracle she hadn't slapped them all upside the head and sent them to their corners—and if Sam had thought that would work, he would have tried it with the others now.

"JACK!"

Jack was still looking Sam's way, watching him approach, his gaze calm and understanding. He mouthed _it's okay_ , and turned his head back to Dean.

No.

No.

_NO._

It was the only word left in Sam's vocabulary. He was sick of feeling helpless and watching the people he loved die. Was it really too much to ask that they all stop getting themselves killed? No.

Just.

No.

 

xii.

 

"No." Dean tossed the gun aside, and a wave of relief crested through Sam. "I'm not going to kill him."

God's face darkened. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Sam crashed into Jack, and held on tight.

 

xiii.

 

Jack had loved zombies. He'd rewatched _Night of the Living Dead_ at least five times that Sam knew of, and spent most of his free time filling their Netflix queue with shows like _Z Nation_ and _The Walking Dead_. Zombie movies were his jam. He'd planned on dressing up as one for Halloween, collecting some of the shredded, nasty clothes that Sam and Dean usually threw away after hunts. He'd been thrilled; he'd be the only one with genuine blood splatters on his costume at the town party.

Sam didn't share Jack's enthusiasm.

And if Jack were here, and not lying lifeless on the ground behind him, Sam was sure he'd reconsider his love.

Despite the hoard pushing in around them, Sam still had to swallow back a wave of fresh grief. Jack was dead. Not only had Chuck been able to wipe him out this whole time, but he'd also tried to manipulate Dean and/or Sam into killing Jack themselves. The storm Sam had sniffed out wasn't just coming. It was here. It had arrived in a tweed jacket and deceptively graying beard.

Behind Sam, on either side of Jack, Dean and Cas were bickering.

"You pissed off God, what did you think was going to happen?" Cas's angel blade was up, eyes on the hoard rather than Dean, but even Sam could feel the glare implied in the words.

"You didn't want me to kill Jack anyway, so I don't see why you're complaining." Dean was the same, but with his gun.

Sam backed up, heels bumping against an object he couldn't think of as Jack's body. They'd instinctively surrounded it, even though he was long past the point of needing protection. All the light had gone out of his eyes, now. They were nothing but burned out sockets.

It was too painful to think about.

The zombies fell on them in a single wave, faster and more intact than the monsters Sam was used to spying over Jack's shoulder on a tv show. It was clear that the Winchesters didn't stand a chance, but he thrashed out anyway, trying to ignore the tearing sensation every time he moved his injured shoulder. He half wished he hadn't tried to shoot Chuck with the gun. He half wished he'd killed the bastard.

They were probably going to die now, anyway.

The bodies were all writhing and crushing, heavy enough to force Sam back. His foot landed on Jack's body and something crunched— _no, oh Jack, no—_ and then the back of his injured shoulder hit Cas's arm and it burned. Sam involuntarily cried out. Dean shouted his name. The weight of the zombies _en masse_ knocked all three of them down.

Sam felt like his own ribs were being crushed. His nostrils were full of decay, worse than anything he'd ever experienced—and he regularly dug up graves. This was usually the point where he started to pray to God, but after the last two days, Sam was officially done with that shit.

He didn't know if Jack was in Heaven or Hell or the Empty or whatever, but that was where he directed his prayer. It was words; _sorry_ , and _I love you_ , and _I screwed up_ ; but it was also feelings, things Sam couldn't sum up even if he wasn't being crushed to death by the undead.

And beneath him, disconcertingly, something stirred.

He wasn't sure he'd felt it at first. Everything was moving. Dean and Cas were still thrashing about, still hoping to get free. The zombies shifted like worms around them. Sam himself was flailing. He couldn't be certain, not until it happened again. And again.

He rolled out of instinct, pushing up against the monster on top of him and doing a belly-flop onto the zombie pile, grabbing at Dean's shirt to get his attention. It was no use; they were stuck in the world's worst mosh pit, and nothing could take his brother's eyes away from the fight.

Sam had lost track of the ground, now. Zombies were above him. Zombies were below him.

He heard a sharp, loud gasp, like someone taking their first breath after being underwater for too long. It sounded like. But no. But maybe. Hope flared in Sam's chest.

"You might want to close your eyes," someone said, clearly and calmly.

Sam screwed them tightly shut, tears pricking at the edges.

_Jack ex machina._

 

xiv.

 

Jack had burned all the zombies out of the graveyard. Dean and Cas stood among the charred remains, still arguing. Sam sat with Jack on the hood of the Impala.

The sky was dark gray, nearly black, even though it was supposed to be two in the afternoon. The trees around the graveyard had all withered. It was clear that this was far from the end of the road for them.

Jack fiddled with the hem of his shirt.

Sam was almost afraid to ask, but he'd been afraid to ask Jack about his soul, too, and that had proven a mistake, so he screwed up his courage and said, "Where did you go?"

Jack pinched the fabric between two fingers. "The Empty. Then Heaven." He cocked his head at Sam. "My soul was already there. So it was complicated. Billie and the Empty, they thought it was fair that way—the Empty would get my mind, and Death would get my soul. But once I actually died, they realized it wasn't going to work."

"Why not?"

Jack shrugged. "They said it was like trying to keep two magnets apart. It would take all of their power to keep me split up." The edge of his mouth tugged into a half-smile. "Once I was back together again, like Humpty-Dumpty, they couldn't keep me dead."

Sam put a hand on the car's hood, suddenly needing the extra support. "You resurrected yourself?"

"Kind of. But it wasn't like I pulled myself out." Jack put his hand next to Sam's, not quite touching. "It felt like both places, the Empty and Heaven, were pushing. Like they didn't want me there. And then I heard your voice, and I was here."

"So you're . . . you have it back? Your soul?" It hardly seemed possible.

"I guess." Jack's nose wrinkled. "It's hard to tell. When I was . . . before . . . it felt like I was slowly freezing. At first, I could still feel things, just more muted. And then it got fainter, and fainter, and the next thing I knew, I was totally numb." His pinky nudged against Sam's before retreating, snapping back into alignment with his other fingers.

Sam held back a sigh. "Well, do you still feel numb now?"

"No." Jack's hand brushed his again, and Sam surrendered, turning his hand over and letting Jack press their palms together. "My stomach hurts. Especially when I look at Dean. But that's all I feel."

Sam thought that was pretty promising, but he kept it to himself. "We'll take it one day at a time, same as always." He glanced over at the kid. "I'm sorry about what happened. We were absolutely wrong to do what we did. I don't know how I could even earn your trust back after . . ."

Jack squeezed his hand. It was crystal clear when he looked back at Sam, eyes round and mouth taut, that his soul was perfectly intact. "Sam, I'm the one who needs to be sorry." His voice wavered. "After everything I did . . . after what happened to Mary . . ." He bit his lip, visibly shaking. "I don't know how you can stand to look at me."

"Okay." Sam needed to take a deep, steadying breath himself. "There's no sense in this. You know you fucked up, kid?"

"I—yeah." Jack hung his head.

"And you understand that what you did, it can't be taken back? And that even if it could, even if you fix something, it doesn't change the fact that you broke it in the first place?"

"Yeah." Jack's next breath was ragged. "I'm sorry, Sam. And I know that nothing I say or do will ever be enough."

"Jack—" Sam didn't know what to say. He didn't want to diminish Jack's apology, or the magnitude of what Jack had done. At the same time, he just . . . wasn't angry. He missed his mom. He missed Jack. Only one of them was still alive. "It's going to be hard, with Dean. He's angry, he's hurt, and he won't admit to being either. I haven't been able to get through to him, and neither has Cas." He threw his brother a look, confirming that yes, Dean and Cas were still going at it.

"It's bad, when Cas can't, right?"

"Right." Sam squeezed Jack's hand. "It's going to be tough for a while. But I think we can make it. I'd still like to be your family, Jack." He glanced at the nephilim. "If you even still want us."

"You were scared." Jack looked up at him, an entire Greek tragedy playing out in his eyes. "I scare you. I always have."

"Yeah." There wasn't a point in disagreeing. "I'm afraid you're going to have another _accident_. That could have happened whether your soul was intact or not. I don't think you'd ever mean to hurt us, Jack, but what happened with Mom just confirmed our worst fears. It's going to take a while to get over that."

"I don't know what to do, then." Jack bit his lip again. "It was better when I didn't have my powers."

"That's not the answer. Your powers are a part of you." Sam ran a hand through his hair. "Look, I've been turned around so many times over this that I don't what's right or wrong or what should be done. The way I see it, we chickened out. We said we loved and trusted you, and then we just . . ." He sighed.

"Point is, I fucked up. You fucked up. But now we've gone and pissed off Chuck and I'm not sure we're going to live to see the end of the week and I don't want to spend it doing _this_." He gestured between them. "We're as good as we're going to be, okay? And I don't know how you feel, but for me. Well. I still love you. None of this has changed that."

Jack blinked. "Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"My face feels hot." He cocked his head. "I think I'm embarrassed." A smile fluttered across his face, and he slid off the hood. "I'm embarrassed, Sam! I have my soul back! And I love you, too."

He was loud enough that Dean and Cas stopped their argument to look over. Sam covered his face with one hand, cringing.

 

xv.

 

So they went off to save the world, Dean and Sam and Cas and Jack. Made a pit stop to pick up Rowena. They didn't really think they'd survive, which was maybe why Dean held Cas's hand in the front seat and Jack kept rambling about all the candy he wanted to try.

And Sam kept records of it in his mind, snip-snapping all the tiny, inconsequential moments when Rowena flicked Jack's forehead or Cas tried to make a joke that made them laugh for all the wrong reasons. They'd always talked about taking a vacation, and this sort of . . . became it. Cheesy roadside attractions, skeezy bars where strange men hit on Jack and Dean got into fistfights and kicked out, sunrises and sunsets and late nights and junk food and Dean's music.

They went camping, sort of. What really happened was that Dean couldn't drive any longer and they were in the middle of nowhere and Dean claimed the front seat, Rowena the back, and Sam and Jack were stuck outside. Cas wandered off, sulking that Dean hadn't let him drive Baby.

Sam slept with his head on Jack's arm, and knew exactly what his heaven was going to look like when he died.

He woke up feeling perfectly rested.

 

xvi.

 

Sam liked Jack best, too.

 

**Author's Note:**

> no seriously. what the hell did I just watch for twenty episodes? because until the zombies broke out of their tombs, that shit was not Supernatural.
> 
> anyway. I had a major attack of the Sam&Jack feels because their bond didn't get nearly enough credit I mean Sam was only the _first person Jack ever saw_ and literally the only person alive who thought keeping the Devil's son was a good idea and _always in his corner_ my ass, Sam Winchester leads the Jack Kline Fanclub and you can't convince me otherwise.
> 
> thanks for reading!


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